though neither of us thinks perfect, yet both consider as competent to render our fellow citizens the happiest and the securest on whom the sun has ever shone. If we do not think exactly alike as to its imperfections, it matters little to our country, which, after devoting to it long lives of disinterested labor, we have delivered over to our successors in life, who will be able to take care of it aod of themselves."

"I learned with great regret the serious illness mentioned in your letter; and I hope Mr. Rives will be able to tell me you are eniirely restored. But our machines have now been running seventy or eighty years, and we must expect that, worn as they are, here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way; and however we may tinker them up for a while, all will at length surcease motion. Our watches, with works of brass and steel, wear out within that period. Shall you and I last to see the course the seven-fold wonders of the times will take? The Attila of the age dethroned, the ruthless destroyer of ten millions of the human race, whose thirst for blood appeared unquenchable, the great oppressor of the rights and liberties of the world, shut up within the circuit of a little island of the Mediterranean, and dwindling to the condition of an humble and degraded pensioner on the bounty of those he has most injured. How miserably, how meanly, has he closed his inflated career! What a sample of the bathos will his history present! He should have perished on the swords of his enemies under the walls of Paris."

"You ask, if I would agree to live my seventy or rather seventythree years over again? To which I say, yea I think with you, that it is a good world on the whole; that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more plsasure than pain dealt out to us. There are, indeed, (who might say nay) gloomy and hypochondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, and despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen, because it may happen. To these I say, how much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened! My temperament is sanguine. I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern. My hopes, indeed, sometimes fail; but not of tener than the forebodings of the gloomy. Thdre are, I acknowledge, even in the happiest life, some terrible convulsions, heavy setoffs against the opposite page of the account. I have often wondered for what gool end the sensations of grief could be intended. All our other passions, within proper bounds, have an useful object. And the perfection of the moral character is, not in a stoical apathy, so hypocritically vaunted, and so untruly too, because impossible, but in a just equilibrium of all the passions. I wish the patholo gists then would tell us what is the use of grief in the economy, of what good it is the cause, proximate or remote."

and

"The public papers, my dear friend, announce the fatal event of which your letter of October the 20th, had given me ominous foreboding. Tried myself in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that, for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medicine. I will not, therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief, nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more where words are vain, but that it is of some comfort to us both, that the term is not very distant, at which we are to deposite in the same cerement our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an extatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love, and never lose again. God bless you and support you under your heavy affliction."

"Putting aside these things, however, for the present, I write this letter as due to a friendship coeval with our government, and now attempted to be poisoned, when too late in life to be replaced by new affections. I had for some time observed, in the public papers, dark hints and mysterious inuendoes of a correspondence of yours with a friend, to whom you had opened your bosom without reserve, and which was to be made public by that friend or his representative. And now it is said to be actually published. It has not yet reached us, but extracts have been given, and such as seemed most likely to draw a curtain of separation between you and myself. Were there no other motive than that of indignation against the author of this outrage on private confidence, whose shaft seems to have been aimed at yourself more particularly, this would make it the duty of every honorable mind to disappoint that aim, by oppos ing to its impression a seven-fold shield of apathy and insensibility. With me, however, no such armor is needed. The circumstances of the times in which we have happened to live, and the partiality of our friends at a particular period, placed us in a state of apparent opposition, which some might suppose to be personal also; and there might not be wanting those who wished to make it so, by filling our ears with malignant falsehoods, by dressing up hideous phantoms of their own creation, presenting them to you under my name, to me under yours, and endeavoring to instil into our minds things concerning each other the most destitute of truth. And if there had been, at any time, a moment when we were off our guard, and in a temper to let the whispers of these people make us forget what we had known of each other for so many years, and years of so much trial, yet all men, who have attended to the workings of the human mind, who have seen the false colors under which pas

Alluding to the Cunningham Correspondence.

sion sometimes dresses the actions and motives of others, have seen also those passions subsiding with time and reflection, dissipating like mists before the rising sun, and restoring to us the sight of all things in their true shape and colors. It would be strange, indeed, if, at our years, we were to go an age back to hunt up imaginary or forgotten facts, to disturb the repose of affections so sweetening to the evening of our lives. Be assured, my dear Sir, that I am incapable of receiving the slightest impression from the effort now made to plant thorns on the pillow of age, worth, and wisdom, and to sow tares between friends who have been such for near half a century. Beseeching you, then, not to suffer your mind to be disquieted by this wicked attempt to poison its peace, and praying you to throw it by among the things which have never happened, I add sincere assurances of my unabated and constant attachment, friendship and respect."

But the cultivation of the affections, social and domestic, and the delights of philosophical and agricultural occupation, were subjects which engaged only a subordinate share of the attention of Mr. Jefferson in retirement. One other enterprise, of public and vast utility, which it was reserved for him to accomplish, constituted the engrossing topic of his mind, from the moment of his return to private life, to the day and hour of his death. This was the establishment of the University of Virginia,-a most genial employment for his old age, and, very appropriately, the crowning act of the long and wonderful drama of his life. Having assisted in achieving for his country the inestimable blessings of civil and religious liberty, he considered the work but half complete, without securing to posterity the means of preserving that condition of moral culture, on which the perpetuation of those blessings forever depends. It was one of the first axioms to which he attained, that the liberties of a nation could never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. A system of education, therefore, which should reach every description of citizens, from the richest to the poorest, as it was the earliest, so it was the latest of public concerns in which he permitted himself to take an interest.

The opinions of Mr. Jefferson on the subject of Education were given in detail, while the Revised Code of Virginia was under consideration; of which the Bill for the General Diffusion of Knowledge,' drafted by him, was a distinguishing feature. The system marked out in that Bill, proposed three distinct grades of instruction; the sum total of whose objects may be explained by adopting a sin

gle expression of the author,-'to give the highest degrees of education to the higher degrees of genius, and to all degrees of it, so much as may enable them to read and understand what is going on in the world, and to keep their part of it going on right.' No part of this expansive system had been carried into effect by the Legislature, except that proposing the elementary grade of instruction; and the intention of this was completely defeated by the option given to the County Courts. The University composed the ultimate grade of the system, and was the one which peculiarly enlisted the zeal of the founder, without, however, subtracting from his devotion to the whole scheme. In this Institution, like those of the university rank in Europe, it was his intention to have taught every branch of Science, useful to mankind, and in its highest degree; with such a classification of the sciences into particular groups, as to require so many Professors only, as might bring them within the views of a just but enlightened economy.

The plan of the University was unique, in its superstructure, in its intellectual regime, and its general organization. It was original with Mr. Jefferson,--the offspring of his genius, aided by his extensive observations while in Europe. The University of Virginia is emphatically his work. His was the first conception, having been started by him more than forty years ago; his, the subsequent impulse and direction which finally brought it to maturity; his, the whole scheme of its studies, organization and government; and his, the beautiful and varied architecture of its buildings, in which he improved the occasion to present a specimen of each of the orders of the art, founded on Grecian and Roman models. He did this last with a view to inspire the youth who resorted thither, with 'the imposing associations of antiquity,' and to retrieve, as far as he could, the character of his country from that pointed sarcasm in his Notes on Virginia, that "the genius of architecture seems to have shed its maledictions over this land." Being located, in gratitude to its founder, within four miles of Monticello, he superintended its erection daily, and with the purest satisfaction. The plan of the buildings embraced: 1st. Pavilions, arranged on either side of a lawn, indefinite in length, to contain each a lecture room, and private apartments sufficient to accommodate a Professor and his family. 2d. A range of Dormitories, connecting the Pavilions, of one story high, sufficient each for the accommodation of two students

only, as the most advantageous to morals, order and uninterrupted study, with a passage under cover from the weather, giving a communication along the whole range. 3d. Hotels, for the dieting of the students, to contain each a single room for a refectory, and accommodations sufficient for the tenants charged with this department. 4th. A Rotunda, or large circular building, in which were rooms for religious worship, under such regulations as the Visitors should prescribe, for public examinations, for a library, for schools of music, drawing, and other associated purposes. The principal novelties in the scheme of its studies, were a Professorship of the principles of government, "to be founded in the rights of man," to use the significant language of the originator; a Profess orship of agriculture; one of modern languages, among which the Anglo-Saxon was included, that the learner might imbibe, with their language, their free principles of government; and the absence of a Professorship of Divinity, 'to give fair play to the cultivation of reason,' as well as to avoid the constitutional objection against a public establishment of any religious instruction. A Rector and Board of Visitors, appointed by the Legislature, composed the governinent of the Institution; and their first meeting was in August, 1818, at Rockfish Gap, on the Blue Ridge, at which Mr. Jefferson presided, and drafted the first annual report to the Legislature. He was also ap pointed Rector of the University, in which office he continued until his death, when he was succeeded by Mr. Madison. The establishment went into operation in the spring of 1825, and is now in a flourishing condition.

The weight and vehemence of opposition which this institution encountered, through every stage of its progress, were such as would have been insurmountable to any person possessing less perseverance, or less ascendency of personal character than Mr. Jefferson. Besides the ordinary circumstances of resistance, common to every enterprise of the kind in this country, it was met at the outset. by a combination of religious jealousies, probably never equalled. Hostile as they were, in every other point, to one another, all the religious sects in the State cordially co-operated in the effort to frus trate an institution, which, from the circumstance of its favoring no particular school of divinity, to the exclusion of another, was presumed to be inimical to all religion, in all its forms. These formidable antipathies, with the host of sectional rivalries, the steady counter